About this project

JOIN OUR COUNTDOWN PARTY May 19, 9am EST:

HELP US REACH OUR STRETCH GOALS IN THESE FINAL DAYS!

If we get to $400K: We’ll add a longer, fully cinematic opening sequence / trailer that will blow you away and help us get people lining up to buy the game, setting the tone for this new Pinkerton Road series. PLUS Moebius on LINUX!

If we get to $450K: All the above, plus an extra 1000 lines of dialogue to flush out the game and we’ll record the main theme with a live orchestra (Bob is drooling over that one).

There is now a paypal option on our website here:

Moebius Concept Art piece by Andy Hoyos

The Simple Truths About Our Campaign:

1) This campaign is for two new adventure games from Jane Jensen, the creator behind Gabriel Knight and Gray Matteradventure games (as well as King's Quest VI).

2) Jane and her husband, composer Robert Holmes, are starting a new studio called Pinkerton Road that will be solely focused on story-driven, 3rd person adventure games. The studio is based in Lancaster County, PA.

3) The first game we are creating is Moebius! See additional details below. The second game, called "Mystery Game X" is still TBA, but it will be produced as part of this offering.

4) It is a goal of ours as a studio to be able to eventually work on more Gabriel Knight games. Having a successful first year with Moebius is a great step in that direction.

5) We need your help. Pledge your support and spread the word.

Please see our "UPDATES" tab for more cool videos about the design process, our dev team, Moebius, Robert's Music and more!

Get our first game: Moebius!

It’s official!
Pinkerton Road’s first adventure game will be Moebius. So what’s it all about?

Story: Malachi
Rector is an antiquities dealer who hunts down artifacts all over the world.
After his upscale Manhattan store is destroyed in a fire, he's hired by billionaire Amble Dexter to investigate a series of events and document them in his
meticulous way.

The first event is the
death of a young woman in Venice. She was found
hanging from a bridge. As Rector
investigates her life, compiling facts for his dossier, he realizes that the beautiful and talented young woman -- and the interrupted path of her life -- had great hidden significance. It appears that Amble Dexter and his
associates are playing with the fabric of life in a way Rector never imagined
was possible. Even he, Rector himself,
is part of a larger pattern. He must
figure out who is doing what, and whether their intentions are for good or ill,
before he can decide if he will play his pre-scripted role -- or try to change
the outcome. This is a metaphysical thriller ala Dante’s Equation and Gabriel Knight.

Art Style & Mechanic: 2D,
graphic novel look and feel (like an updated GK1). It will be a 3rd
person adventure game with a point-and-click mechanic and lots of sophisticated
puzzles. It will have two modes: Casual Mode (with hints, a hotspot finder and a simplified interface) and True Adventure (more challenging -- like the Gabriel Knight games).

Size: Moebius
will be about the size of GK1 – 50 rooms with 10-20 hours of gameplay
(depending on your level and gameplay mode).

Moebius -- The Original Concept Art:

What kinds of adventure game will Moebius be? Hard? Casual?

Our plan is to have a "casual" and a "true
adventure" option at the start of the game. This will allow us to
provide an easier path through for those who are not hard-core players -- while
allowing our 'true adventure' path to be uncompromised (and by uncompromised we
mean classic Sierra-style puzzles). We're looking forward to beta-testing
with our studio CSG members and tuning the game.

The
pledge tiers talk about “CSG Supporters” or “CSG Members”. What is that and what do I get for it?

Part of our vision for
the studio is to have a direct relationship with our players – the designer
communicating directly with the fans. We call that “CSG” or “Community Supported Gaming”. The
idea is that with your pledge you “join” the studio family for one year. You won't only get the games we produce that
year, but you get a virtual seat in the studio. And the higher you pledge, the greater your access will be!

Our current CSG “year”
will run from the present through June of 2013.

Besides Moebius, what will I get?

CSG
supporters ($16)
will get:

-- One game -- Moebius -OR-- Mystery Game X,
free as PC or Mac download, DRM free and/or on Steam or GOG (depending on which
of those platforms accepts Moebius after beta).
English or subtitled version in FIGS or Portuguese. You'll also get a discount on our iPad version.

-- Access
to one video update per quarter (our choice)·

-- Access
to our CSG member only forum.

CSG
supporters ($30)
will get the above plus:

-- A/B Testing -- participation in our vote polls (such as
voting on two character concepts)·

-- “Best of the year”
game music
soundtrack (composed by Robert Holmes), delivered digitally.

Full
CSG members ($50 and up) will get:

A virtual seat in the studio. We can’t fly you all out to the farm, but we
can do the next best thing! You’ll get all the above plus:

-- All the Games we do this year -- Moebius, Mystery Game X and Lola and Lucy's Big Adventure free as PC or Mac download. Moebius will be DRM free and/or on Steam or GOG (depending on which of those platforms accepts Moebius after beta). Mystery Game X is so new, this is still TBD! English or subtitled version in FIGS or Portuguese.

-- Friday art updatesposted
on kickstarter– A little something to look forward to each week! Short and sweet, showing one work in progress
art piece, a cover or ad or sometimes new concepts under development (similar
to the pdf we passed out for voting).

-- Monthly video updates – Jane
and Bob and sometimes some team members will show the newest art, over
the shoulder glimpses of our games in development and talk about the process of
making games (hopefully in an entertaining way). Or, we might be in the studio recording voice
over or at a conference showing the game.
Imagine having been ‘inside’ the making of GK1 or GK2 like that. Only CSG members will get these video
updates.

-- Alpha and Beta test
opportunities -- Exclusive opportunities to see the games early
(if you choose to).

-- Pdfs of Jane’s design bibles –This
is like the script or screenplay for the game, the original vision, written by
and digitally signed by Jane.

-- Exclusive streaming Launch parties
with “Let’s Play!” --
Shortly after we send the game out to our CSG members, we’ll host a live streaming
“Let’s Play” party with Jane, Robert and the team and play through the new
release together.·

$200 level

-- Moebius n a "big box" edition and Mystery Game X in a retail box edition, both signed by Robert and Jane.

-- pdf of GK1 design bible, digitally signed by Jane

-- ftp access to all our digital soundtrack music for the year in WAV, AIFF and mp3 formats

-- Please add $10 for shipping outside the U.S.

The higher tiers include even more neat stuff! See the rewards tiers to the right.

Tell us more about the GOODIES!

Pinkerton Road "Best of
the Season" Soundtrack ($30 and up) - A selection of the best pieces composed
for all our games this CSG season by Robert Holmes, either digitally delivered
or on a CD with a specially designed cover.

Design Bibles ($50 and up)-- See update #5 for a
description and sample pages from Jane's design bibles. The $50 tier will
receive the Moebius game bible. The GK
design bibles are also available at higher tiers.

GK1 & 2 novels as e-books ($50 and up)– These novels are out of
print and used copies can be expensive.
These versions will be digitally signed by Jane.

CSG annual T-shirt ($100
and up) -- Each season's T-shirt will be unique and only available to CSG
members and team. Designed by one of our artists.

Pinkerton Road 2012 Creative
Review ($100 and up for pdf, $1000 and up for hard copy) -- a book that includes a section on all the games
we produce, concept art, screen shots, team pics and bios, design bible
excerpts, pics and bios of voice actors and behind the scenes stories. A
great keepsake!

The "Big Box" edition ($200
and up) -- Besides being in a 'big box' we will create some other goodies for
inside, like a companion booklet with an original short story by Jane, sample
sketches and character bios.

Pinkerton Road All Music ftp ($200
and up) -- All the pieces composed this
CSG season by Robert Holmes, digitally delivered via ftp in lossless WAV, AIFF
and mp3 formats.

Pinkerton Road Annual Open
House ($250 and up)-- Following the farm model, we plan
to hold an open house at our farm/studio in beautiful Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania. We'll get to meet fans, you'll get to meet each
other, and we'll all stuff ourselves silly with PA Dutch food and listen to a
Scarlet Furies concert! What could be better? Unfortunately, due to
logistics we have to limit the number of attendees so it's offered at upper tiers
only. We'll plan this for just before or after a big game conference
like E3 or GDC so those travelling internationally have a better chance
to attend. We are 2 hours from Philadelphia and 3 hours from D.C.
and NYC. The area has lots to see and do if you want to extend your
stay. http://www.padutchcountry.com/index.asp

And many more!

The
Road Starts Here

Thanks for checking out our Kickstarter campaign and, if
you've signed up, welcome to the Pinkerton Road family! We're eager to
start our first year of producing games that are intriguing,
unforgettable and incredibly threatening to industry execs. We hope to
make it as fun for you as it is for us.

If we have some extra buffer in the funding, we would love to provide our games in these languages and others. We know a lot of Jane's GK fans are European and we want to them to be a part of this new studio.

UPDATE: We have an offer from Words of Magic, the translator of Gray Matter, to do French subtitles for us to support the campaign, so we will definitely have a French subtitled version. Thank you, Thierry!
UPDATE #2: We have also received offers for subtitles written in Portuguese and Spanish. Thank you very much Monica, Goncalo and Josue!

UPDATE #3: We have an offer from Paolo at indies4indies to provide Italian subtitles for this project. Thank you very much Paolo!

Our goals for the studio are really very simple! a) to make the games we're passionate about making, b) to have control over the production and quality so we are proud of the final outcome, c) to have a direct connection to our players and d) to retain the IP so that we can make more games in the series that you, the fans,decide you really like. Doesn't that sound like the way things ought to be?

A small, core team, including Jane and Robert, will be located at the Pinkerton Road HQ in Lancaster County, PA. We have two excellent external development teams lined up to do the production work, teams Jane has worked with to ship great games in the past.

A 3rd person adventure game like the one we're planning would normally cost at least twice that. But we are putting in some funding as well, and the team is taking less up front in exchange for rev share. So this project already has committed believers behind it. The last piece we need is you!

Yes, we will also sell the games in the regular channels, but our CSG members will get them before any other release - plus you'll get all of the exclusive bonuses that go along with being a CSG member.

We would love to do Gabriel Knight in the near future. Because that IP does not belong to us, it's not a given. Having our own studio, and successfully shipping a title, will make obtaining the rights more likely than ever before.

We needed help managing our CSG members. Can you imagine sending builds to 10,000+ different emails? Kickstarter manages all that for us, so we can easily run a campaign drive and post updates as often as we like.

Since we made that decision, a lot of kickstarter campaigns for other games have launched. We considered waiting, but in all honesty, we don't think the tide of Kickstarter projects is going to abate anytime soon.

It's like this – publishers have been the bouncer at the club door for a long time, deciding who got let in and who did not. Now, with crowd-funding, it’s as if someone's opened a back door. It’s no surprise that there’s a rush of people who want to go through it. Support the projects you want to see happen and wish the rest good luck. And let’s thank our lucky stars there’s a new way to get games financed and broaden the spectrum of what this industry creates!

-- Our CSG members will get the games before they go to retail, so naturally we will be anxious to get them to you. If you are at a tier that gets physical copies of the games, you will get each game before it is about to release.

-- "Everything else" physical (T-shirts, sketches etc) we will try to mail at once time to save on shipping. That package will go out as soon as we can manage it after kickstarter has wrapped up (which may still be 1-2 months to get all the goodies manufactured, etc)

At the $100 tier you get: Moebius in a 'big box' (unsigned) and Mystery Game X on DVD/jewel case.

At the $200 tier you get Moebius in a 'big box' and Mystery Game X in a retail box, both signed by Bob and myself.

The $200 tier at the right currently says a 'big box of all this seasons games'. That description was written at the time this campaign started, before we even had an idea there would be a Mystery Game X. You cannot modify the text on reward tiers in kickstarter.

At that time we said if we reach $300K in funding, we will do ONE game this season. If we reach $600K we will do TWO games this season. So the way things stand ($350K), you would only have gotten ONE big box game, Moebius.

The publishing deal for Mystery Game X came later. This kickstarter is not funding that game, a publisher is funding it. I managed to get some free units for my CSG members. But that will not include a big box edition. I don't have final say over what their retail box looks like, nor do I have the right do to my own "big box" edition. However, I have done my best to get my members the retail box, which we will sign for you.

Pledge $51 or more

764 backers

THIS HAS BEEN ADDED TO THE $50 TIER -- the GK1 and GK2 novels as e-book. (applies to all tiers above, too).

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $99 or more

18 backers

"SILVER NON-PHYSICAL" -- This tier gets all of the digital items that the $100 tier gets (including the pdf of the Creative Review book and digital art print) but none of the physical goods. Good 'mid ground' for people who don't want items shipped to them.

Pledge $101 or more

This has BEEN ADDED to the $100 tier -- 1 high-res digital art print from this year's art, signed by the artist, Jane and Robert. 8.5"x11". Suitable for printing and framing.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $102 or more

58 backers

We have added the big box edition of Moebius to the $100 tier. Since we can't edit the tiers, I'm putting this info here but note that you only need to sign up for the $100 level to receive this . Please add $10 for shipping outside the U.S.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $115 or more

132 backers

Everything at the $100 level PLUS you will get BOTH of our CSG T-shirts (Moebius and Farm CSG). Note that the levels above this will still only get ONE T-shirt. Remember to add $10 to your total for shipping outside the U.S.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $200 or more

65 backers

An old school "big box" DVD version of this season's games, pdf of the GK1 design bible, digitally signed by Jane, ftp access to all our digital soundtrack music for the year in WAV, AIFF and mp3 format. All previous reward tiers' incredible goodies!

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $215 or more

19 backers

Everything at the $200 level PLUS you will get BOTH of our CSG T-shirts (Moebius and Farm CSG). Note that the levels above this will still only get ONE T-shirt. Remember to add $10 to your total for shipping outside the U.S.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $224 or more

54 backers

By popular request -- this tier gets all the physical goodies of the $200 tier PLUS all 3 GK design bibles.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $225 or more

28 backers

"DIGITAL DELUXE" tier. This tier is for those who want *no hard goods* shipped to them. It does not include any "hard goods" in previous tiers but does include all digital items in previous tiers. PLUS: our games delivered digitally with a pdf of the "big box" cover and inside goodies, all THREE GK design bibles as pdfs. 3 high-res digital art prints, 8.5x11", signed by the artist, Jane and Robert, suitable or printing and framing.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $239 or more

14 backers

Everything at the $224 level PLUS you will get BOTH of our CSG T-shirts (Moebius and Farm CSG). Note that the levels above this will still only get ONE T-shirt. Remember to add $10 to your total for shipping outside the U.S.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $250 or more

117 backers
Limited (683 left of 800)

"CSG GOLD MEMBER": Invitiation to annual open house & Scarlet Furies concert at the Pinkerton Road studio/farm for you and 1 guest. Scarlet Furies CD. 1 Game poster from our biggest release. Thanks in the game credits for all games shipped this CSG cycle. All previous reward tiers' incredible goodies! U.S. shipping included. If international please add $10.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $265 or more

68 backers

Everything at the $250 level PLUS you will get BOTH of our CSG T-shirts (Moebius and Farm CSG). Note that the levels above this will still only get ONE T-shirt. Remember to add $10 to your total for shipping outside the U.S.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $500 or more

19 backers
Limited (101 left of 120)

All tier goodies before this one (with a "Big Box" version of the game). PLUS, one original, one of a kind, GK1 pencil sketch signed by Jane, Robert and John Shroades. See update #9 for details.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $515 or more

15 backers

Everything at the $500 level PLUS you will get BOTH of our CSG T-shirts (Moebius and Farm CSG). Note that the levels $1000 + will get 2 T-shirts if they want both. Remember to add $10 to your total for shipping outside the U.S.

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $1,000 or more

27 backers
Limited (223 left of 250)

"STUDIO MEMBER": An original piece of art from each of this season's games signed by the artist, Jane and Robert. A hard copy of our Pinkerton Road 2012 Creative Review book, signed by Jane and Robert. All previous reward tiers' incredible goodies!

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $1,500 or more

5 backers
All gone!

All previous tier goodies PLUS: Robert Holmes will compose a music piece just for you. Send him a photo of yourself or your special someone along with a brief description of what you want to convey (I love you, You're having my baby, Bad Ass). He'll produce a full soundtrack piece which you'll receive as a signed CD plus lossless digital track. This can be yours exclusively forever OR you can have it appear in one of our games with the title and credit of your choice.

Estimated delivery:Sep 2012

You selected

Pledge $4,999 or more

0 backers

New reward for the $5K and up levels -- the Scarlet Furies will fly anywhere in the U.S. and perform a private concert at your event. (everything else at the $5K tier still applies as well)

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $5,000 or more

2 backers
Limited (13 left of 15)

"STUDIO SILVER MEMBER": A character design of you as a character in Gabriel Knight or one of our other games (your choice) with a full-color print signed by the artist, Jane and Robert. A hard copy of the GK1 design bible, personalized and signed by Jane and soft bound. All previous reward tiers' incredible goodies!

Estimated delivery:Mar 2013

You selected

Pledge $10,000

3 backers
Limited (7 left of 10)

"STUDIO GOLD MEMBER": Lunch with Jane and Robert at the studio in PA or at a game conference they're attending. A private farm/studio tour (in Lancaster County PA) including a hands-on sneak peek of our gaming morsels in production. Your character design (from previous tier) will be a character in one of our games (name and likeness). All previous reward tiers' incredible goodies!